Friends, colleagues remember Canadians killed in Mumbai

Elizabeth Russell was a former nurse at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital and a psychiatric social worker.

Photograph by: handout
, CNS

MONTREAL — Elizabeth Russell loved the sea and the Sunday before she died in the terrorist attack in Mumbai, e-mailed her three children in Montreal.

“Writing from Goa, and the beach, 36 degrees outside and the pool is great,” she wrote. “Is it snowing ... yet?”

Russell was touring India with her frequent travelling companion, Dr. Michael Moss who was also killed in the attack.

Russell was once a nurse at Montreal’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital, then worked as a psychiatric social worker at Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital before opening her own private practice in Westmount.

She was 65. The Department of Foreign Affairs did not identify the second Canadian victim until Saturday.

According to her family, Russell went with Moss to India at the end of October fully expecting her life partner to die of a heart condition during their trip.

In a memo outlying their travel plans, Moss, 73, said he did not expect to survive the vacation and if he died in India he wished Russell to have him cremated there.

Both apparently died together when gunmen stormed their room in the Oberoi Hotel.

Gunmen apparently searched the hotel records intentionally intending to target Britons and Americans. There is speculation that Moss, who emigrated from Britain to Canada in the 1960s to work when doctors opposed to medicare went on strike in Saskatchewan, was travelling on his British passport.

He and Russell met when both worked at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital and had been together since the mid 1980s.

Russell was born in Montreal in Nov. 4, 1943, and was educated at Havergal College, a girls boarding school in Toronto. She studied at McGill University where she obtained a Master’s degree as a psychiatric social worker, and after her marriage to an architect ended in divorce raised her family on her own.

She leaves two daughters and a son.

“She had so much compassion and empathy for patients,” said Carol Sinclair, a therapist in Burlington, Vt., who worked with Russell. “She had a great sense of humour.”

Sinclair said the last time she saw Russell was at a wedding in Vermont just before the couple left for India.

“She said she wanted to go because they had been there before and found it so beautiful. She said something about him (Moss) too, and told me that he wasn’t well and had been thinking of death.”

Myra Issley, who worked with Russell at the Jewish General Hospital, described her friend “as very waspy, but she was a real mensch, a good solid citizen. She’d serve tea and crumpets to her interesting women friends, and she was able to make friends from all over the place, from different walks of life. Professionally, she was incredible. She developed a large private practice in Westmount. She was clinically advanced, non-judgmental.”

Moss has four children from two previous marriages, including a son who lives in England.

A daughter, who is also a doctor in Montreal, has refused to talk to reporters about her father “until all members of the family are able to come to Montreal.”

Moss worked at Montreal’s Richardson Hospital and also worked for the federal government, doing medical assessments of new immigrants.

His photograph and a condolence book has been set up in the lobby of the hospital.

“He was revered as an old-style family doctor who was not only interested in treating patients as people but as human beings,” said Francine Dupuis, the centre’s executive director. “And he was highly regarded by the nursing staff, which is a compliment to any doctor.”

More than 170 people died when terrorists attacked 10 sites throughout Mumbai starting Wednesday.

Of the 21 Canadians thought to be in the downtown core, Russell and Moss were killed and two others, Montreal actor Michael Rudder and Helen Connolly, a Toronto yoga instructor, were injured.

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